Re: RAID-10 explicitly defined drive pairs?
From: Peter Grandi <hidden>
Date: 2012-01-07 14:25:18
quoted
And I suspect that XFS swidth/sunit settings will still work with RAID-10 parameters even over plain LVM logical volume on top of that RAID 10, while the settings would be more tricky when used with interleaved LVM logical volume on top of several RAID-1 pairs (LVM interleaving uses LE/PE-sized stripes, IIRC).
Stripe alignment is only relevant for parity RAID types, as it is meant to minimize read-modify-write. There is no RMW problem with RAID0, RAID1 or combinations. But there is a case for 'sunit'/'swidth' with single flash based SSDs as they do have a RMW-like issue with erase blocks. In other cases whether they are of benefit is rather questionable.
One would use a linear concatenation and drive parallelism with XFS allocation groups, i.e. for a 24 drive chassis you'd setup an mdraid or lvm linear array of 12 RAID1 pairs and format with something like: $ mkfs.xfs -d agcount=24 [device] As long as one's workload writes files relatively evenly across 24 or more directories, one receives fantastic concurrency/parallelism, in this case 24 concurrent transactions, 2 to each mirror pair.
That to me sounds a bit too fragile ; RAID0 is almost always preferable to "concat", even with AG multiplication, and I would be avoiding LVM more than avoiding MD.